i know i'm going to feel this way until you kill it
by martianwitchery
Summary: "The little world you and she make on the mattress is the best of all the ones you know. The stakes are so low, and the solutions are clear, easy to come back to no matter how your minds might stray from the objective. It's a world you both agree on how to save."


_i._

"It happened again."

"What did?"

You cross your arms.

Her eyes do a quick sweep of the room, then dart back to you. "…What is it, Conner? _What_ happened again?"

You don't think she's bluffing, but you just can't put what you saw into words that you want to say. All that comes to mind is "assaulted," "destroyed," "nearly" and "killed." A muscle twitches in your arm.

"Is… it… something I should already know?"

"You said that last time, it was an accident."

You see the recognition spark in her, and then her expression goes flat. "_Oh._ Well, last time was. I wasn't trying to knock him out. I was just trying to get to the information as quickly as possible." She shifts away her cape.

"This time?"

Her shoulders go up in a light shrug. Her hood slinks back into the neck of her suit. "Like you said, it happened again."

"You _did it_ again."

"I was just trying to get to the information as quickly as possible! I guess… that amount of psychic pressure all at once has more of an after-effect than I thought it would. I'll work on it."

That's it. You know her when she's anxious: her shoulders turning concave, her hands clasping together and wringing each other's fingers, her arms folding in between her knees. You watch her now throw her head back and flick her fingers playfully through her sweat-stiffened hair. She leans back to hold out her arms and stretch.

"You don't seem all that bothered by it."

"Every mission takes an unexpected turn— 'accidentally neutralizing an enemy' sure isn't the _worst_ we've had to deal with, don'tcha think?" A slight grin. A slight shrug. "The mission was _just_ that much more successful."

"_M'gann._" It's as easy as ever to capture her attention—harder to bear it. You sit down beside her and she adjusts to face you, pulls her legs up onto the mattress and folds them under herself. Her hand lands near your hand. Neither touches the other. "That man's probably in the _hospital._"

She nods, blinks. If your words sink in, they only make it to the shallow end of her mind.

"That didn't need to happen. Whether you meant it or not, you took it way too far."

One blink. This time, no nod. Her mouth twitches, then she's on her feet in an instant with no grunt of effort, no push of her hands or legs. The metal door slides open, and you don't call her back.

She comes back on her own within the hour, hair dripping, skin hot. You take no pleasure in how she drags her feet, or in how her arms cross at the wrists in her lap, but the heaviness in her eyes and lips is some kind of strange relief. She breathes in and out deeply, pulling her shoulders up and down with her chest. "I'm sorry," she tells the spot on her teal bedsheet where your shadow overlaps hers. "I'll be… more careful… next time we're in the field."

It's not you she hurt. The apology is not yours to accept. But you do. You weave three fingers into hers and tug a hand out of her lap because you know it will make her look at you, and because you just like to hold her hands. She lifts her head.

"You know I like it when you're careful."

She smiles. You make her smile. You make her smile and think and feel all the things she makes you feel, and you love her. There's no mistake she could make that could change your mind on that.

.

_._

_ii._

You don't have to think about the bad parts of her when your eyes are closed and her mouth is open. You won't find them with your tongue; they don't hide between her teeth or against the inside of her cheek. The goosebumps rising under your fingertips don't tell a story, don't spell anything out in any pattern other than the one she keeps her cells sewn into—and even if they did, you wouldn't comprehend it, because your hands are skimming. Her body like this, the familiar curves of ribs to waist to hips to thighs, tells you who she is when her actions have been making it unclear; these ups and down are easy to ride, easy to hang on through. You like to recognize yourself in her when her voice is calling out wordless wants. You want her too.

She knots fingers from both her hands into your hair and catches your hips between her knees. You don't need her guidance to find the spot she wants first: a secret hollow just under the juncture of her ribs that's only there every other breath, and only with the right arch of her spine. You breathe hard onto it, drag your bottom row of teeth and lower lip across it, and her legs jolt with quick kicks that brush her skin against yours.

It makes you think about them opening, and sure enough, they do. You move yourself up so that every part of her skin that you can see is drinking in your shadow, and so that you can see her face. Sharp sparks work to clear away the heavy fog behind her eyes as you send a hand on a swirling path down her belly; you watch her teeth catch and release a lip swollen by her own bites, not yours, and you kiss pressure down on it like a wound. Your finger traces the outermost edges of her other lips, and you feel more sparks shoot off under her skin, making her shake. Her arms wrap around your neck.

You like that when she shakes, she holds onto you, even though you don't like her to ever be afraid. The little world you and she make on the mattress is the best of all the ones you know. The stakes are so low, and the solutions are clear, easy to come back to no matter how your minds might stray from the objective.

It's a world you both agree on how to save.

Your hand trails off into stillness, resting lightly on her hip.

_Conner?_ she hums into your mind, softer than the teeth pushing through her half-open mouth. Her eyes blink in a blitz, erratic from the strain of keeping up her panting, her concentration on the heat slowly fading between her legs. _Should we link?_

"No" drops out of your mouth too easily, but gets her eyes to snap into focus on you. That misty fever feeling in your skin turns into just something sick, so you gulp down her next breath like medicine, feeling her fingers dig into your shoulders for support. A ripple moves through her chest to yours as she tries to breathe you down into her lungs, pulls at you despite how thick and solid and heavy you are. When you give her air again, her panting comes back as its own effort. You sit back on your heels to give her a moment to recover. "S'probably better you don't hear what's going on in there anyway."

"What does that—_unnh_," she says as you take a breast into your grip, kneading her nipple into a point with a few quick flicks of your thumb. The tip of her tongue peeks out between suddenly clenched teeth, a warm pink thing glistening against white in the light. You watch a tremor run through the muscles of her abdomen, and feel the scratch sound of her heels skidding in the sheets like matchsticks against your bones. She slides a hand down to her hip on impulse but keeps it going until it's halfway down her thigh, then takes as much flesh as she can into her grip to make her hand feel full. It makes your own arousal weep. "Is something wrong?" she asks groggily, locking her other hand in the hair she pushes out of her face.

"No," you say again, with the same degree of ease. Your fingers push until they've pried hers from her thigh and intertwined with them, then with a nod of your head you nudge her open with the tip, then bridge of your nose.

You can hear the wetness in her breath as she gasps, like even her throat is sweating for you. You run your tongue up and down everything that's swelling; breathing heat until all your senses fill with steam, fill with her. Her hand pulls at yours and you hold tight, letting her use it to get a feel for your motions then direct them with the right twist and tug of your wrist. You purse your lips to suck, and the soles of her feet smack the bare skin of your back. One tremor becomes two, becomes three becomes four becomes left and right, side to side, and when her hips buck up off the mattress you push them down to keep your place.

Her voice leaks fully into her breathing so that each second is another lost word, another language dying under the throb of her heartbeat. Neither of you need to speak. It's better between the two of you now when you don't. The thought makes your nostrils flare, so you thrum harder against her, barely keep your teeth from snapping down on flesh boiling with tenderness, swollen with trust and love and need for you. You grip her hipbone so hard, you think you might break it. The pulse pounding in your head becomes two, hers and yours, building and building until it's a race you can't keep up with. You want her to swallow you whole before you can shatter her.

A hand clasps around your cock and you groan, you own hand slipping off her skin and into the sheets as your head jerks up and back. "_Please_," you hear, glancing down and then up to see she's stretched her arm out of shape to reach you. "_You need it too, I feel it,_" she says breathlessly, her face more red than green. You feel yourself drip down on her hand, and you shudder.

"I wasn't done." You run your thumb over her clit and watch her brow twitch—gritting your teeth as it sends a pulse through your own cock as well. "I wasn't done with you."

"I wanna do it _with_ you," she says, smiling softly, setting a glow to her face that drains the anger out of you, leaving simple raw heat in its wake. The warmth in her eyes finds some place in you that's still only tepid and sets it ablaze.

You think of those same eyes beaming with blank, cold light, and it feeds the flames. You give her hand a careful nudge and she lets you go, snapping her bones back into place and blinking pronouncedly. "Is everything all right?"

"I'm still thinking about earlier."

"_Oh._" Her legs still lie splayed out in front of you, but her face hardens. For once, you wish you needed more words to explain yourself—that it wasn't so clear what the problem was between you and her, because that made it clear that you hadn't solved it. She places a hand between her legs to keep herself stimulated, fingers stroking idly, and says, "I said I'd be more careful next time."

"Yeah." Your own fingers start to wander up and down her thigh, bolding freckles on her skin as she lets it listen to your touch. "Yeah, I know."

"I'm trying not to think about it either," she says. Her eyelids flutter to keep themselves open, only you start to recognize that she's pushing them half-closed herself. Her fingers get less idle, and more white flashes at you from between her lashes than before. "I'd rather think about this."

You slow her fingers with a few kisses to her knuckles, and she pulls them away, groaning. "Me too," you reply. Your breath that close makes her hips twitch, and you slip around with your tongue before you find her wettest place and drag up from it, pushing a "_mmnf!_" out of her tightly-shut mouth. With your eyes closed you find her clit again by trial-and-error touch, feeling flesh quiver under the flat hands you've pressed against her innermost thighs, holding her down. You skirt past it one last time, and her hands scramble through your hair as if she could dig her way through your head to get at what she needs.

The hairs on the back of your neck rise in protest. You don't like the thought. You ram your bared teeth into her clit almost with resentment, and no pleasure stirs in her throat before a sharp cry escapes it. She holds tight to you, draining pressure out of her body through the fingers tugging at your scalp, as you twist the sneer out of your face and loosen your tongue again.

You feel coughing, choking attempts from her mind to find purchase in yours, but you're focused on her clit now, and she can't focus on anything but your mouth. Her heart is in your head instead, setting a baseline for your speed, climbing and climbing until you could tick down the seconds before climax if you wanted to, but you know not to stop yet.

She comes just as you start to lose your full breath. A sudden arch in her back shoves her voice out through her open mouth in one long howl, frees all the weight from her lungs and strength from her fingers—her hands slide off of you and fall limp onto the mattress, pressure going to her elbows and neck as your tongue pushes her stomach into the air. You cup her ass with both hands as you press your tongue flat against her, bobbing your head now, only flicking your tongue at the tip and at the right time and place, and her legs try to embrace you like arms. If she had the concentration left, she could shift them, but her howl has turned to heaving, turned to gasping and sobbing—and a high-pitched squeak like her throat is cracking in two tells you that she's coming down now. Even her rasps lose the rough edge that makes them more than just panting breaths. You lick salt and sweetness off your lips and swallow it down.

Right below her navel, you rest your forehead, riding the sleepy flow of her breathing until wisps of fingers start to flick at your hair, coaxing you up to her. She almost struggles to pull her lips enough out of a smile to let them kiss you, and you lower your face for her to reach. She showers you with kisses all along your neck and jaw, your cheeks and nose, and you forget the tight line of her mouth as she dropped a body in the dust. Her fingertips run over your skin like water, stirring sugar into your nerves so you feel bright and weightless, and you forget the arm stretched out before her as her hand snapped into a fist. She hums happily and hungrily against your lips, fingertips tip-toeing down the slope of your back to the lowest point they can reach while retaining their shape—and you bring her free hand to your temple, tap until your mind is awash with her presence, soaking her in. You remember to forget for now.

.

.

iii.

M'gann _is_ careful next time. You almost miss it. One heart among the litter of others slows almost to a stop—a blank, black spot against the roaring blaze of adrenaline around you—and it could easily be an enemy retreating. You almost shout to your teammates that one is getting away, only your objective is to simply end the threat, and intimidating the attackers so severely that they get cold feet and run is the cleanest, most admirable way to reach that objective. You take pride in having learned to throw your weight around without crushing anyone underneath it; you bear that virtue proudly across your chest.

If the League of Shadows saw their forces as more than empty husks to begin with, maybe the black lump in the dirt wouldn't have been left behind for you to pick out in the low light. But that one stray pulse never quite fades off completely, and while the rest of your squad is filing back into the ship, you're turning a body over to tear a mask away from dulled eyes and a warm mouth hanging open. You turn the man on his side to keep him from choking on his tongue.

You gave her another chance, and she's given you another choice. The voice that calls you back to the ship isn't hers, and with every inch of you you want that to signify guilt.

Sweat and shakiness make your phone slippery in your hands, but you manage to dial 911. You speak out of a shallow place in your throat as you tell the operator your location, and hang up before they can ask you to stay on the scene until authorities arrive. Fresh cracks split into your screen as the "end call" icon fades to black under your thumb.

You become dust kicked up in her wake, a crater like the ones your boots once plowed into the earth on impact, clumsy and crumbling, violent—you follow close behind her like a trail of blood seeping off the trim of her cloak from the back of the Bio-Ship to the briefing room floor. As she delivers the mission report, you watch her wrists cross at the small of her back, and with stifled heat behind your eyes you dare her fingers to cross instead. Her mind has already shed the glove you picture her slipping it into in order to do her dirty work and keep a clean conscience—the wall she must put between herself and whatever power keeps steering her hands and mind, the disassociation you want her to _need_ to force—because she omits her actions with ease and speaks only of her _results_. She lays the information she stole as bare as if she had torn something tangible off the enemy's person—some kind of _sick_ souvenir—but you can barely process details over the sound of small joints popping, your fingers curling tighter into fists.

She sounds like you.

There are many little pieces of you that you would gladly skip stuffing back into the pod and shove straight into a tomb instead. You hate how much of what you know was picked and chosen to be placed in your brain before you even had much more to your body than a brain, that was sewn into you like stitches meant to shape you into someone else's toy; into a weapon. There's no disassembling your mind to clear it of other people's words, of flat pictures collaged onto the walls in the place of memories, of knowledge you never earned. You hate all the little buttons that get pressed in your head and make pre-programmed sounds come out.

She has wired her own button into her mind now and slammed a mental fist down on it. Words spill out of her mouth as if from a tapped vein—somebody else's—as she stares beyond the eyelets of Nightwing's mask to a fixed point in the rock wall of the Cave. You ram a mental fist of your own into the very spot and see the wall breaking, see light pour in from outside despite the hour, get her to blink again sooner and faster; you _wake her up_. She takes no notice. Her head keeps that upward tilt. Her back keeps the iron bars she's built into her body in place of a spine, the prison she's carved out of herself for use at her own discretion.

You keep hearing the words of a criminal coming from inside her, even and especially when she concludes that the mission had no major complications.

Nightwing tells her, "Good work," and she lets out a puff of air, relaxes her shoulders. An exchange of nods between the two of them, and she's headed back into the hall as the rest of the room dissipates around you, leaving you and Dick like rocks pushed ashore by the tide. He smiles at you, satisfaction turning into expectation as the air goes thin, and space opens for your grievances.

You think if it were Kaldur, you'd say something. You think if it were Kaldur, you wouldn't even have to. You think if it were Kaldur, _she_ wouldn't even have to, because he'd know. The Kaldur you knew stands high on a pedestal in your mind, larger than life, hovering with the same unearthly glow as the holograms buried deep under your feet because the Kaldur you knew is dead and gone.

But the M'gann you know is neither, and without saying a word you leave to find her, wherever she's left herself, whatever _is_ left.

She's given you another choice, and you're giving her another chance.


End file.
